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Summary and Reviews of Justice - Crimes, Trials, and Punishments by Dominick Dunne

Justice - Crimes, Trials, and Punishments by Dominick Dunne

Justice - Crimes, Trials, and Punishments

by Dominick Dunne
  • Critics' Consensus (4):
  • Readers' Rating (2):
  • First Published:
  • Jun 1, 2001, 288 pages
  • Paperback:
  • May 2002, 352 pages
  • Rate this book

About This Book

Book Summary

Justice brings together Dunne's mesmerizing essays of justice denied and justice affirmed in one volume. His search for the truth is relentless. His courage and his storytelling skills shine from every page.

For more than two decades, Vanity Fair has published Dominick Dunne's brilliant, revelatory chronicles of the most famous crimes, trials, and punishments of our time. The pursuit of justice has become his passion -- a passion that began during the trial of the man who murdered Dunne's daughter and who was sentenced to six and a half years and released in less than three. Dunne's account of that trial and its shocking result became the first of his many classic essays on justice.

Dominick Dunne's essays do much more than simply describe; his investigations have shed new light on those crimes and their perpetrators -- and demonstrated how it is possible for some to skirt, even flout, the law. His persistence and personal involvement in the matter of Martha Moxley's murder was an important catalyst in bringing a dormant case back to life.

Here in one volume are Dominick Dunne's mesmerizing tales of justice denied and justice affirmed. Whether writing of Vicki Morgan's hideous death; Claus von Bülow's romp through two trials; the media frenzy of Los Angeles in the age of O.J. Simpson; the death by fire of multibillionaire banker Edmund Safra in Monaco; or the ominous silence surrounding the death of Martha Moxley in Greenwich, Connecticut, and the indictment -- decades later -- of Michael Skakel, Dominick Dunne tells it honestly and tells it from his unique perspective. His search for the truth is relentless. His courage and his storytelling skills shine from every page.

Justice:
A Father's Account of the Trial of His Daughter's Killer

It was the beginning of a long hot summer. I flew to Los Angeles on July 5, 1983, for an indefinite stay. Throughout the flight from New York I engaged in diligent conversation with the stranger next to me, postponing as long as possible facing the feelings of dread within me. My two sons, Griffin and Alex, had preceded me out from New York. Alex, the younger one, met me at the airport, and we drove into Beverly Hills to the house where my former wife, Ellen Griffin Dunne, called Lenny, lives. Griffin was already there. It is not the house we lived in as a family. It is smaller and on one level. Lenny has multiple sclerosis and is confined to a wheelchair. We were gathering, a family again, for a murder trial.

The first time I saw Lenny she was getting off a train at the railroad station in Hartford, Connecticut. She was ravishing, and I knew that instant that I would marry her if she would have me. We ...

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Reviews

Media Reviews

Booklist - Vanessa Bush
Fascinating stuff, though less than complimentary about the American system of justice.

Kirkus Reviews
[The] author is scrupulously honest in his reporting, and thorough. He also moves at a good clip, pulling readers along as though a hand had clasped their sleeve, pointing out inconsistencies in testimony and the willful corruption of the truth by shady lawyers..... Are the scales of justice at work here? Hardly. But Dunne's courtroom tales are a lot more lucid than most judge's instructions to their juries.

Library Journal - Mary Jane Brustman
While Dunne does include many facts on the cases, the accounts are filled with opinion, innuendo, name-dropping, and irrelevant society gossip. Much of the information is either not attributed or attributed to confidential sources. [This] will be engaging reading for those who enjoy tantalizing stories of murder, mayhem, and celebrities, public libraries may want to purchase.

Publishers Weekly
[Dunne] is not a spectacular writer. He is, however, a master storyteller, particularly in his ability to place telling details.

Reader Reviews

not important

this book had a lot intrresting stories that really amazed me, since i'm in the major of criminal justice. I liked this book and i hope that more people would read a book like this. It really teaches a life lessons
Terry

At times, I couldn't put this book down, even though Mr. Dunne seems to ramble sometimes and repeat himself.

As horrifying as the murders ALL are, the fact that justice was ignored somehow makes them even worse.

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